What Exactly Did Kevin Spacey Do on the Set of House of Cards?

Netflix announced this afternoon that the next season ofHouse of Cards, the hit series built around Kevin
Spacey as the power-hungry politician Frank Underwood, will be the final one.

The announcement comes the day after BuzzFeed reported that the actor
Anthony Rapp said that Spacey made a sexual advance toward him
in 1986, when Spacey was 26 and Rapp was 14. After refusing to
respond to BuzzFeed’s reporter, Spacey eventually put outa statement in which he
claimed not to remember the incident, apologized to Rapp “if I
did behave as he described,” and officially came out as gay.

“I want to deal with this honestly and openly, and that starts
with examining my own behavior,” Spacey wrote.

Although Rapp is the first person to go on the record saying
that Spacey committed sexual misconduct, other stories of
misbehavior have followed Spacey for years. In March of 2015,
Gawker reported on claims about
Spacey’s sexual aggressiveness toward younger men, including
those who staffed the set of House of Cards.

After Gawker published that article, the site continued to hear
from people who had heard about or witnessed the same behavior.

On October 26, Jezebel wrote to Netflix to ask if the company
had ever investigated the claims in the 2015 post, or if it had
received any complaints of its own. A spokesperson wrote back
that “This is the first I hear of it” and agreed to look into
it.

The next day, the spokesperson called to say that Netflix had
no plans to put out a statement, because the company has no
involvement in on-set production of the TV shows it
distributes. She said that managers for the main House of
Cards production company, Media Rights Capital, told
her that they had never heard of any complaints about Spacey’s
behavior.

Varietyreported this morning that
Beau Willimon, the creator of House of Cards, has
issued a statement calling Rapp’s story “troubling” and saying
“I neither witnessed nor was aware of any inappropriate
behavior on set or off.”

Netflix referred us to Media Rights Capital’s spokesperson, who
said this morning that the company is “very, very intolerant”
of misbehavior and that she would look into the same
allegations. This afternoon, Netflix and Media Rights Capital
released a joint statement:

Media Rights Capital and Netflix are deeply troubled by last
night’s news concerning Kevin Spacey. In response to last
night’s revelations, executives from both of our companies
arrived in Baltimore this afternoon to meet with our cast and
crew to ensure that they continue to feel safe and supported.
As previously scheduled, Kevin Spacey is not working on set
at this time.

If you know any more about Kevin Spacey’s behavior on the set
of House of Cards, please get in touch.